Parent Action Group for Education Malaysia (PAGE) chairman Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim said she personally supported academic Anuar Ahmad’s proposal for Putrajaya to lower the starting age for primary education from seven to five years.
However, she voiced concern over the education ministry’s readiness to act on the proposal, highlighting the ongoing challenges in executing the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025.
“Clearly not (ready for that). So long as the ministry continues to flip-flop (in its decisions) and make excuses, it will be difficult to make changes,” she told FMT.
“There is only one year left to implement the blueprint, but we are still far from achieving our targets.”
Noor Azimah said five years is an appropriate age for children to enrol for primary education, citing a World Bank study that shows that Malaysia’s pre-school enrolment rate reached 84% in 2020.
“This shows that the children are ready, but the real question is whether the education ministry is equally ready to see it through,” she said.
She said Malaysia’s 2022 international student assessment (Pisa) scores, which showed that the country was lagging three years behind high-performing ones, revealed a need for transparency in recording student data.
“To improve reading, writing and arithmetic (3M) skills, it is better to make interventions to ensure our students can master them,” she said, adding that early education should be centred around play and exploration.
The latest Pisa scores show that Malaysian 15-year-olds scored 409 in arithmetic (down from 440 previously) and 416 in science (down from 438 in 2018). In reading, Malaysians scored 388, down from 415.
Malaysia ranked in seventh place among the Asean countries that took part in the rankings, with Cambodia topping the list, followed by Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.
Meanwhile, National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) secretary-general Fouzi Singon said implementing primary education from as early as five years would only increase the government’s financial burden.
“The allocation for education is already quite high and yet still not sufficient to fulfill the existing needs in terms of infrastructure and teaching staff,” he said.
Fouzi questioned the ministry’s capability to provide earlier education when the existing setup cannot even accommodate students from all socio-economic backgrounds.
He said that currently, there are still insufficient pre-schools under the ministry. Thus, priority is given to those from the B40 families.